I
AFTER his wife’s death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling out
his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to Brooklyn.
For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had
never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.
Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up,
prospered, and become what the local press described as “prominent.”
He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and
a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row of
houses across the street, the “trolley” wires forming a kind of aerial
pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the steeple of the
church which he and his wife had always attended, and where their only
child had been baptized.
It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and
sentimental; yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far
from his boy. Ronald Grew was practising law in New York, and there
was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a river’s
flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to be near him his father must
move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of the situation
generally, that the translation, when it took place, was to Brooklyn,
and not to New York.
“Why you bury yourself in that hole I can’t think,” had been Ronald’s
comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower in Brooklyn,
and that he had heard of a house that would suit him. In reality he had
said to himself--being the only recipient of his own confidences--that
if he went to New York he might be on the boy’s mind; whereas, if
he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald would always have a good excuse for not
popping over to see him every other day. The sociological isolation of
Brooklyn, combined with its geographical nearness, presented in fact the
precise conditions for Mr. Grew’s case. He wanted to be near enough to
New York to go there often, to feel under his feet the same pavement
that Ronald trod, to sit now and then in the same theatres, and find
on his breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency,
inserted Ronald’s name in the sacred bounds of the society column. It
had always been a trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four hours to
read that “among those present was Mr. Ronald Grew.” Now he had it
with his coffee, and left it on the breakfast-table to the perusal of a
“hired girl” cosmopolitan enough to do it justice. In such ways Brooklyn
attested the advantages of its propinquity to New York, while remaining,
as regards Ronald’s duty to his father, as remote and inaccessible as
Wingfield.
It was not that Ronald shirked his filial obligations, but rather
because of his heavy sense of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently sought
to minimize and lighten them. It was he who insisted, to Ronald, on the
immense difficulty of getting from New York to Brooklyn.
“Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there’s not
much use in the ragged rim left. You say you’re dining out next Sunday?
Then I forbid you to come over here for lunch. Do you understand me,
sir? You disobey at the risk of your father’s malediction! Where did you
say you were dining? With the Waltham Bankshires again? Why, that’s
the second time in three weeks, ain’t it? Big blow-out, I suppose? Gold
plate and orchids--opera singers in afterward? Well, you’d be in a nice
box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung up half-way over.
That’d be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown
you--singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks!
(What’s the daughter’s name--Daisy?) No, _sir_--don’t you come fooling
round here next Sunday, or I’ll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn’t
find me in anyhow, come to think of it. I’m lunching out myself, as it
happens--yes sir, _lunching out_. Is there anything especially comic in
my lunching out? I don’t often do it, you say? Well, that’s no reason
why I never should. Who with? Why, with--with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr.
Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn’t know about him--he’s only an old
friend of your mother’s and mine.”
Gradually Ronald’s insistence became less difficult to overcome. With
his customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to
“take the hint,” to give in to “the old gentleman’s” growing desire for
solitude.
“I’m set in my ways, Ronny, that’s about the size of it; I like to
go tick-ticking along like a clock. I always did. And when you come
bouncing in I never feel sure there’s enough for dinner--or that I
haven’t sent Maria out for the evening. And I don’t want the neighbors
to see me opening my own door to my son. That’s the kind of cringing
snob I am. Don’t give me away, will you? I want ‘em to think I keep four
or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and night--same as the lobby
of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels. And if you pop over when you’re not
expected, how am I going to keep up the bluff?”
Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance--his intuitive
sense, in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to be
expended, was one of the qualities his father most admired in him. Mr.
Grew’s perceptions in this line were probably more acute than his son
suspected. The souls of short thick-set men, with chubby features,
mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between folds of fat like
almond kernels in half-split shells--souls thus encased do not reveal
themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional instruments.
But in spite of the dense disguise in which he walked Mr. Grew vibrated
exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald
was perpetually stimulating and feeding his imagination.
Ronald in fact constituted his father’s one escape from the impenetrable
element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in. To a man so
enamoured of beauty, and so little qualified to add to its sum total,
it was a wonderful privilege to have bestowed on the world such a being.
Ronald’s resemblance to Mr. Grew’s early conception of what he himself
would have liked to look might have put new life into the discredited
theory of pre-natal influences. At any rate, if the young man owed his
beauty, his distinction and his winning manner to the dreams of one of
his parents, it was certainly to those of Mr. Grew, who, while outwardly
devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew’s Secure
Suspender Buckle, moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all
the figures of romance. In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant
a figure as any of its noble phantoms; and to see his vision of himself
suddenly projected on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant
popular conquering son, seemed, in retrospect, to give to that image a
belated objective reality. There were even moments when, forgetting his
physiognomy, Mr. Grew said to himself that if he’d had “half a chance”
he might have done as well as Ronald; but this only fortified his
resolve that Ronald should do infinitely better.
Ronald’s ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well.
Mr. Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was “not a genius”;
but, barring this slight deficiency, he was almost everything that
a parent could wish. Even at Harvard he had managed to be several
desirable things at once--writing poetry in the college magazine,
playing delightfully “by ear,” acquitting himself honorably in his
studies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable sporting set that
formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of Society. Mr. Grew’s
idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son should pass
through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material
considerations. It was Mr. Grew’s notion that, in the rough and hurrying
current of a new civilization, the little pools of leisure and enjoyment
must nurture delicate growths, material graces as well as moral
refinements, likely to be uprooted and swept away by the rush of the
main torrent. He based his theory on the fact that he had liked the
few “society” people he had met--had found their manners simpler, their
voices more agreeable, their views more consonant with his own, than
those of the leading citizens of Wingfield. But then he had met very
few.
Ronald’s sympathies needed no urging in the same direction. He took
naturally, dauntlessly, to all the high and exceptional things about
which his father’s imagination had so long sheepishly and ineffectually
hovered--from the start he _was_ what Mr. Grew had dreamed of being.
And so precise, so detailed, was Mr. Grew’s vision of his own imaginary
career, that as Ronald grew up, and began to travel in a widening orbit,
his father had an almost uncanny sense of the extent to which that
career was enacting itself before him. At Harvard, Ronald had done
exactly what the hypothetical Mason Grew would have done, had not his
actual self, at the same age, been working his way up in old Slagden’s
button factory--the institution which was later to acquire fame, and
even notoriety, as the birthplace of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle.
Afterward, at a period when the actual Grew had passed from the factory
to the bookkeeper’s desk, his invisible double had been reading law at
Columbia--precisely again what Ronald did! But it was when the young man
left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast himself
boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the most
astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew. It was in
New York that the scene of this hypothetical being’s first exploits had
always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald was to achieve
his first triumph. There was nothing small or timid about Mr. Grew’s
imagination; it had never stopped at anything between Wingfield and
the metropolis. And the real Ronald had the same cosmic vision as his
parent. He brushed aside with a contemptuous laugh his mother’s tearful
entreaty that he should stay at Wingfield and continue the dynasty of
the Grew Suspender Buckle. Mr. Grew knew that in reality Ronald winced
at the Buckle, loathed it, blushed for his connection with it. Yet it
was the Buckle that had seen him through Groton, Harvard and the Law
School, and had permitted him to enter the office of a distinguished
corporation lawyer, instead of being enslaved to some sordid business
with quick returns. The Buckle had been Ronald’s fairy godmother--yet
his father did not blame him for abhorring and disowning it. Mr. Grew
himself often bitterly regretted having bestowed his own name on the
instrument of his material success, though, at the time, his doing so
had been the natural expression of his romanticism. When he invented
the Buckle, and took out his patent, he and his wife both felt that to
bestow their name on it was like naming a battle-ship or a peak of the
Andes.
Mrs. Grew had never learned to know better; but Mr. Grew had discovered
his error before Ronald was out of school. He read it first in a black
eye of his boy’s. Ronald’s symmetry had been marred by the insolent fist
of a fourth former whom he had chastised for alluding to his father as
“Old Buckles;” and when Mr. Grew heard the epithet he understood in a
flash that the Buckle was a thing to blush for. It was too late then
to dissociate his name from it, or to efface from the hoardings of the
entire continent the picture of two gentlemen, one contorting himself in
the abject effort to repair a broken brace, while the careless ease
of the other’s attitude proclaimed his trust in the Secure Suspender
Buckle. These records were indelible, but Ronald could at least be
spared all direct connection with them; and from that day Mr. Grew
resolved that the boy should not return to Wingfield.
“You’ll see,” he had said to Mrs. Grew, “he’ll take right hold in New
York. Ronald’s got my knack for taking hold,” he added, throwing out his
chest.
“But the way you took hold was in business,” objected Mrs. Grew, who was
large and literal.
Mr. Grew’s chest collapsed, and he became suddenly conscious of his
comic face in its rim of sandy whiskers. “That’s not the only way,” he
said, with a touch of wistfulness which escaped his wife’s analysis.
“Well, of course you could have written beautifully,” she rejoined with
admiring eyes.
“_ Written?_ Me!” Mr. Grew became sardonic.
“Why, those letters--weren’t _they_ beautiful, I’d like to know?”
The couple exchanged a glance, innocently allusive and amused on the
wife’s part, and charged with a sudden tragic significance on the
husband’s.
“Well, I’ve got to be going along to the office now,” he merely said,
dragging himself out of his rocking-chair.
This had happened while Ronald was still at school; and now Mrs. Grew
slept in the Wingfield cemetery, under a life-size theological virtue of
her own choosing, and Mr. Grew’s prognostications as to Ronald’s ability
to “take right hold” in New York were being more and more brilliantly
fulfilled.